Data of the Sixth United Nations Survey on Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice

Data of the Sixth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (1995 - 1997) as entered into the United Nations Secretariat's database are available for download as of the following dates:

Most Governments maintain a mechanism to record developments in criminal activity. However, as noted in the
Global Report on Crime and Justice , "a country's open announcement in the international arena of the extent of its crime problem and its processing of offenders through the justice system is a major political event" (Newman, 1998: 8). The validity of data and the impression that it makes are often of great importance to Governments at the national and international levels. National statistics on crime are, therefore, often criticized for reflecting not trends in crime per se, but the activities of the agencies that record statistics on crime. As a result, official statistics on crime tend to under-report true crime figures, leaving gaps, particularly with regard to types of crime that are not conventional. In response to these concerns, many criminologists and government agencies have conducted self-report surveys and victimization surveys, claiming that these methods give a more accurate picture of criminal activity. Such methods, however, can be reductive. Household victimization surveys, for example, exclude information on corporate, white-collar, administrative and political crime. While the debate continues as to the merits of the various methods, a consensus has emerged that conclusions on the state of crime should be based on a set of indicators that can supplement each other. For example, the European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control, affiliated with the United Nations, recently published a report containing profiles of countries in Europe and North America. (Kangaspunta/HEUNI, 1999). The report combines police figures with victim survey results, as well as other data sources such as those of the World Health Organization. What has become clear is that police statistics often reflect trends apparent in the victim survey results, such as increases and decreases in criminal activity.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to
Mr. Roy Walmsley,
UK Home Office, Research, Development, and Statistics Directorate, for his
analysis 1 and
analysis 2 of the Prison data of the first release.

The spss data matrix contains the following columns:
country: Country name in English
qnumber: Number given to a variable in the questionnaire
variable: Explicit description of a variable
v1995: the numeric value entered per Country, Variable and 1995
v1996: the numeric value entered per Country, Variable and 1996
v1997: the numeric value entered per Country, Variable and 1997

Errors if release 1 (corrected in release 2):

The values of variables 12.07 JFCONV Juvenile females convicted in the criminal courts and 12.08
JMCON Juvenile males convicted in the criminal courts are wrongly exchanged in the above
datasets.This error will be corrected in future updates.

In order to be consistent with previous waves of the survey the following variables of the sixth survey will
be renamed in future updates: 19.01 TOPROY to TOPROD, 19.02 ADPROY to ADPROD, 19.03
JUPROY to YUPROD; 20.01 TOPARY to TOPARD, 20.02 ADPARY to ADPARD, 20.03
JUPARY to JUPARD.